Bishop Saint Gerard Sagredo’s (Szent Gellért püspök) damaged statue in Buda / Gellért Hill. On the opposite bank of the river Danube lies Pest, where you can see the stump of the Franz Joseph I bridge (today it is called Liberty Bridge) which was blown up in january the 16th 1945.

The Siege of Budapest

Becoming the arbiters of the Carpathian basin, Hitler and Mussolini responded to Hungarian demands by awarding in 1938 a narrow strip of former Upper Hungary, now Slovakia, inhabited primarily by Hungarians. Here Regent Horthy and his wife are shown exiting the historic Kassa Cathedral, with the palace guard in the background, after a thanksgiving service.

 Horthy Visits Recovered Kassa Cathedral, 1938

For the sake of arranging the details of Hungary’s large-scale military participation in the Russian campaign, Marshall Keitel, saluting here at his official ceremonial reception on cloudy Hero’s Square, followed Ribbentrop to Budapest during January, 1942. Berlin’s original demand for Hungary’s total military participation was eventually scaled back to about fifty-percent of her military resources, upon the latter’s insistence. Keitel promised that the Reich would supply the heavy equipment necessary, like tanks and the like, for beefing up the Hungarian Second Army with sufficient modern hardware for reaching the technological fighting level of the opposing Red Army.